Bush's legacy

By Richard CohenPublished: April 5, 2006 12:00AM

By Richard Cohen

NEW YORK -- President Bush is starting to look beyond his presidency. His focus is on his legacy which, he is sure, will vindicate his decision to go to war in Iraq. But his most fitting memorial is likely to be where I was Sunday -- the immense gash in lower Manhattan known as Ground Zero. More than four and a half years after the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, the hole has yet to be filled.

Tourists come and look. The selling of souvenirs is prohibited at the site itself but around the corner, on Vesey Street, peddlers hug the shadows. The proper souvenir of this place, though, is the memory of its immense emptiness. Its a hole filled with broken promises and silly rhetoric, an inverted monument to the Bush administrations unfathomable failure even to capture Osama bin Laden.

Where is this killer? Still in Afghanistan or nearby Pakistan, is the unofficial answer. Certainly not caught, is the official answer. This terrorist, this madman, this mass murderer of clerks and stockbrokers, of deliverymen and cooks, of IT guys and shoeshine boys, is still on the loose. Bin Laden was the guy Bush was going to get dead or alive, or something like that, but he is still at large, mocking us with his occasional tapes and his insufferable freedom. Even Afghanistan, liberated from the Taliban, is receding into chaos. The Taliban, it turns out, never left.

The failure to capture or kill bin Laden is the failure of Bush and his Pentagon team of incompetents -- Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and the former commander of the Afghan and Iraq wars, Tommy Franks. One is still in office, the other getting rich on the lecture circuit, and neither offers much of an explanation of how the mass killer of Americans still has not been caught. Wherever he is, if he is, you can be certain he is having one dickens of a time operating his apparatus, Rumsfeld once said. Yes, this is comforting. And tell me also bin Ladens mail is often late.

More 9/11 tapes surfaced last week. These were about 130 calls to New York Citys 911 emergency operators. Mostly, you could hear only one side of the conversation, the operators, but at least one family released the voice of their son making his last call from the World Trade Center. The awful helplessness of the operators as the immensity of the tragedy dawned on them, the impeccably calm voice of a man about to die -- all this parted the memory curtain many an American had draped around the event and the pain returned. The other shoe has not dropped. Bin Laden giggles in his mountain lair.

Little wonder Bush focuses on posterity. The present has to be painful. His embrace of incompetents, not to mention his own incompetence, is impossible to exaggerate. Rummy still runs the Pentagon. The only generals who have been penalized are those who spoke the truth. (They should get some sort of medal.) Victory in Iraq is now three years or so overdue and a bit over budget. Lives have been lost for no good reason -- never mind the money -- and now Bush suggests that his successor may still have to keep troops in Iraq. Those of us who once advocated this war are humbled. Its not just that we grossly underestimated the enemy. We vastly overestimated the Bush administration.

This hallowed ground, this pitiless pit, has become Exhibit A to the inability of government to function. Plans get announced, news conferences held, breathtaking models shown of buildings reaching for the sky -- and nothing happens. George Pataki, the governor of New York, supposedly fashions himself a presidential candidate, yet he cannot even get this development under way. He is at loggerheads with the sites developer and so nothing happens. In a city where developers are king -- this is Donald Trumps hometown, after all -- you can still go to Ground Zero and see zero. This is 16 acres of Katrina and all it taught us about feeble political leaders.

Maybe we should leave Ground Zero as it is. The imagination can provide a fitting memorial to those who died. We dig a grave in the breezes, Paul Celan wrote in his Holocaust poem Death Fugue. We can dig ours as high as the World Trade Center once stood. The ugly emptiness will remind us always to be wary of the grand schemes of politicians. They cant build a building. They cannot capture a mass murderer. They cannot wage war in Iraq. This is their hole. It is, by dint of failure, George Bushs presidential library. His proper legacy is a void.